Friday, August 20, 2010

As the Android market now has well over 70,000 apps, finding the apps you want can be hard. Sometimes you know exactly what you want, and then searching is a great way to get your app. But often, you don’t know the exact name of an app you might like, and then it’s more useful to browse around and see what other people like. The Google Android market doesn't allow easy discovery of interesting new apps, because the all-time ranking of apps rarely changes the apps that are on top. The AppBrain hot apps list is a big step in the right direction, but we think browsing for apps could be even better.

Today we’re happy to launch a major upgrade to the AppBrain website, http://www.appbrain.com/. In addition to a cleaner user interface, it features much better ways in which you can browse for Android apps. By using anonymous aggregated user statistics, we are able to provide a number of interesting new ways to browse for apps.

For instance, you can now look for apps from the tools category that are popular among the youngest users of AppBrain, and find a Drivers Ed app. Or find out that there's three Hello Kitty themes in the top 10 popular themes among women.
We also made it much easier to find apps that are interesting to people from a specific country. I was happy to now easily find the “Albert Heijn” application from the list of apps most used in the Netherlands, where I’m from. The 15 countries we currently provide most-used lists for are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Hong Kong, Brazil, France, Canada, Spain, and Portugal. Other countries unfortunately don’t have enough users on AppBrain to provide a ranking, but we will add more countries as soon as more people join!

In addition to the new lists, we also enhanced the ways you can filter the selection of apps down to what you want. For instance, the hot apps are now viewable by category, by clicking them on the left side of the screen. In addition to filtering by category, you can also add a filter to only get free, paid, new, updated, or price-reduced apps.

We hope you like the new look of the site and the new ways to browse the Android market!

Mathijs for the AppBrain team.

P.S. If you’re a developer of an Android app and are interested in more advanced stats about your app, check out the AppBrain developer dashboard.